Aug 30 On View: "Made in L.A." @ Hammer Museum

Now on display at the Hammer Museum in Westwood, "Made in L.A" is a biennial art show featuring the work of thirty-five artists all working in Los Angeles today. It seeks to show the wide diversity of the cities art scene with everything from site specific installations to performance pieces and films. The artists featured run the gamut from the well known to the newly emerging and the vast majority of the work was made specifically for this show and is being seen for the first time.
One of the artists featured is Lecia Dole-Recio, who creates compelling pieces that blend the distinction between painting and collage by utilizing unused sections of previous paintings and assembling them into new pieces. She likens her work to the spolia building technique where old bricks and stone reliefs are used in the construction of a new building. Another artist on view is Jennifer Moon, who spent nine months in prison for an attempted robbery that transformed her work and life. It lead her to create the Revolution which seeks to bring about a "worldwide shift based on love, presence of mind, and empowerment." (Hammer Museum) Her work in the show is about her struggles between creating art and finding love all envisioned on a cosmic scale. It includes a book of all her lovers since the early 1990's hand written in Elvish with lavish illustrations, as well as a sculptural egg with a sculpted town inside and a figure of the artist about to take flight. Max Malanky's work uses old bed sheets as canvas which he dyes to recreate stills from 1970's and 80's porn films. The bright often cartoonish colors shake the viewer out of seeing the images as they were filmed and into a meditation of the human form and the male gaze.

The show as a whole seeks to represent the vast cornucopia of humanity living and working in Los Angeles and includes artists who are male, female, and queer as well as people of color and artists collectives. Throughout the run of the show there will be special programs that include local dance troops, speakers, and filmmakers all helping to piece together and examine the intricate mosaic that is Los Angeles in 2014.